REGINA – The CEO of Federated Co-operatives Ltd. responded Wednesday to allegations from victim impact statements read in court Tuesday.
The Consumers’ Co-op Refinery was fined $280,000 for “failure to supervise” in the October 6, 2011 explosion.
The prosecution read statements from victims who claimed supervisors at the refinery ignored workers’ concerns about safety, ignored safety alarms and did not ensure a safe work environment.
“Our culture of safety is top-notch and we work to improve it all the time.”
However, CEO Scott Banda said he is proud of the company’s safety culture.
“We have an 80 year history in this city and over those 80 years I would put our record up against anyone’s in the industry,” he said.
He also added that supervisors on site “would say that our culture of safety is top-notch and we work to improve it all the time.”
Banda explained how the explosion happened; the piece of pipe thinned by corrosion was the subject of some debate in Tuesday’s proceedings.
“What we’re talking about is a processing unit, and we have 32 processing units on site and kilometres and kilometres of pipe,” said Banda. “It was in an older section. It was a span of pipe that was 5.1 metres long in a long stretch of almost 70 metres where someone in 1961, simply, unfortunately, regrettably, picked up the wrong piece of pipe and put it in that run.”
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Banda said the company has worked “very hard since 2011” to embed safety into every aspect of work at the refinery. He sited a 5-year project with DuPont, an internationally-recognized company for process safety management, as an example, but that project began in 2008. He said other international refinery experts have also been brought on site.
Occupational Health and Safety researcher and Business Administration professor, Sean Tucker was in court on Tuesday. Despite Banda’s assurances, he said the proceedings provided “no further insight into the safety culture at the Co-op refinery.”
Tucker said that’s because another explosion on December 24, 2013 did not result in any injuries and so was not the subject of any investigation.
He said the victim impact statements (allegations therein have not been proven in court) provide an alarming glimpse into the work environment – one former employee claimed when people did raise concerns about safety he was told to “pick up tools and go home” if he didn’t like the safety system.
“[We have] no further insight into the safety culture at the Co-op refinery.”
Tucker said, “I think it would be a really positive step for them to invite the media for a tour of the facility – something to date, which they have not agreed to do. That would be, I think, a show of good faith and commitment that they let the public in and let media talk to workers if the media asks to.”
“That’s a real double-edged question,” Banda said in response to the idea of a media tour. “These are complex systems that are working under pressure with hydrocarbons and by nature, there is risk involved. We don’t open our facility to general tours or to wander around for exactly the safety reasons.”
He added, “What would it prove to show some pictures?”
Some victims of the 2011 explosion released an official statement Wednesday. It reads in part:
“After severely injuring 52 workers in the 2011 explosion, the only sanction was a $280,000 fine, which is about 0.038% of its 2014 profits. Further, despite widespread reports that a poor culture of safety prevailed at the Refinery when the explosion happened, the sentencing was based on the mistaken idea that the incident resulted from a contractor’s error from the 1960’s. The explosion was the result of more recent misconduct at the facility that experienced dozens of fires, gas spills, and explosions over the past four years alone.”
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